Decided to have my first little issue today... I woke up with some cramping, and it hasn't abated so I called the doctor and they've decided I should get off my feet. So half-day for me. Don't worry--they think I'm fine; I don't have any spotting or anything, my blood pressure is fine, etc--it's just a case of cramps. I just feel like I have my period, basically.
Anyhoo. Since I'm heading home, I'm gonna keep this short, but I wanted to share a couple fun links with y'all...
Pink's new video "Stupid Girl." Hilarious.
Excellent article in the New Yorker about pit bulls. It's got a tough opening, but if you stick with it, the information in it is critical and fabulous. Wonderfully written. Reminder: I know many of you hate pit bulls and will never think they are good dogs. We've already discussed it here, so please let's not rehash that whole fight again. As the proud owner of a loving and gentle pit bull mix, being told over and over again how my dog is going to kill me or my child ANY DAY NOW makes me tired, and I'm supposed to rest today.
I'd love to write a lot more about this, but I'm just going to post a couple of my favorite quotes:
"A Georgia-based group called the American Temperament Test Society has put twenty-five thousand dogs through a ten-part standardized drill designed to assess a dog’s stability, shyness, aggressiveness, and friendliness in the company of people. A handler takes a dog on a six-foot lead and judges its reaction to stimuli such as gunshots, an umbrella opening, and a weirdly dressed stranger approaching in a threatening way. Eighty-four per cent of the pit bulls that have been given the test have passed, which ranks pit bulls ahead of beagles, Airedales, bearded collies, and all but one variety of dachshund. “We have tested somewhere around a thousand pit-bull-type dogs,” Carl Herkstroeter, the president of the A.T.T.S., says. “I’ve tested half of them. And of the number I’ve tested I have disqualified one pit bull because of aggressive tendencies. They have done extremely well. They have a good temperament. They are very good with children.” It can even be argued that the same traits that make the pit bull so aggressive toward other dogs are what make it so nice to humans. “There are a lot of pit bulls these days who are licensed therapy dogs,” the writer Vicki Hearne points out. “Their stability and resoluteness make them excellent for work with people who might not like a more bouncy, flibbertigibbet sort of dog. When pit bulls set out to provide comfort, they are as resolute as they are when they fight, but what they are resolute about is being gentle. And, because they are fearless, they can be gentle with anybody.”
And:
"A mean pit bull is a dog that has been turned mean, by selective breeding, by being cross-bred with a bigger, human-aggressive breed like German shepherds or Rottweilers, or by being conditioned in such a way that it begins to express hostility to human beings. A pit bull is dangerous to people, then, not to the extent that it expresses its essential pit bullness but to the extent that it deviates from it. A pit-bull ban is a generalization about a generalization about a trait that is not, in fact, general. That’s a category problem."
And:
“A fatal dog attack is not just a dog bite by a big or aggressive dog,” Lockwood went on. “It is usually a perfect storm of bad human-canine interactions—the wrong dog, the wrong background, the wrong history in the hands of the wrong person in the wrong environmental situation. I’ve been involved in many legal cases involving fatal dog attacks, and, certainly, it’s my impression that these are generally cases where everyone is to blame. You’ve got the unsupervised three-year-old child wandering in the neighborhood killed by a starved, abused dog owned by the dogfighting boyfriend of some woman who doesn’t know where her child is. It’s not old Shep sleeping by the fire who suddenly goes bonkers. Usually there are all kinds of other warning signs.”
Have a good day, all. I have a longer post about my addiction history brewing. Promise.
